Status: Barely maintained

Along side Route 17 upon a hill nestled between some trees and houses is an old Lutheran cemetery that could be easily overlooked by passers by. In fact, I myself have passed it by probably hundreds of times before I ever noticed it and that’s when I decided to go check it out.

The first time I went there was in 2002. I had taken pictures with my digital camera and saved them to my hard drive on my old computer, but the whole thing went kaputt a few months later and unfortunately, all the pictures were lost. I had almost forgotten about this little cemetery until I had a dream about it. I knew it was time to go there again.

In the year and a half’s time that had passed since the first time I had been there, not much had changed as expected. It was slightly more overgrown than I had remembered it, probably due to the season. Some of the stones had supports on them, probably because they had broken. And my favorite part, the old stone well, was in the far corner.

Reading the sign outside the cemetery I learned that in 1713, eleven German Palatine families settled in the Mahwah area and organized a congregation under Lutheran Pastor Justus Falckner. A small log church was built near this site in 1720 and then was replaced twice, once with a church that is a few miles down the highway near Sloatsburg.

If you happen to see this well-hidden cemetery while passing by, check it out.

- Ember, 2003